Your documents
The documents you give your AIs live in one collection of your own: books, articles, letters, notes, code, whole folders of them. It is yours, not any one AI's. Each AI is granted the documents it may draw on, and a document given to two AIs is read and remembered once.
Everything here happens on your computer. A document is read, cut into passages, indexed and summarized by models running on your device. No page of it is sent anywhere unless you ask an online model a question and the passages that answer it ride along with that question.
Adding documents
Open an AI's Knowledge tab in its editor, or the Remembers tab of its Memory page, and drop files or folders on the panel, or choose them. A folder is read through, subfolders included. Reading runs one document at a time; a book takes a moment, a decade of articles takes a while, and you can keep working. The activity card at the bottom right follows you to every page with the document being read, the pieces remembered so far, and a Stop, and it names the AI the documents are for. The Knowledge tab and the memory page of that AI show the same line, and their rows appear as each document lands. Reading keeps going while the app is open; your AIs draw on each document as soon as it is in.
What it reads: PDF, Word, OpenDocument, EPUB, text and Markdown, spreadsheets, HTML, and code. Photos and scanned PDFs without a text layer are reported as unreadable rather than silently skipped. The originals can be moved or deleted afterwards; the app keeps its own copy of the text.
Documents are read whole. There is no cut at a set size, so the second half of a novel is as available as the first.
What each document gets
- A card - a short summary written on your device: what the document is, what it covers, who it is for. It shows under the document on the Knowledge tab and the memory page.
- A Mine tag - marks writing that is yours. It is guessed from the file's own author field (Word, OpenDocument, PDF and EPUB files carry one) against your Flowsta name, your username and the name you have told an AI, and it stays yours to flip.
- The author shown beside the name, when the file names one.
Cards are written by the helper model or, without it, by the local model you have loaded. They are never written online.
How your AIs use them
When you ask a question, the AI is handed two things beside it: a one-line card for every document it has, so a question about the collection ("what do my notes have in common") sees all of them by name; and the passages that match the question, chosen by meaning across every document it has. Answers say which document they drew on.
On a local model the block is sized to the room the model really has, so a small model on a short context still gets what fits. If you have pinned a model's context in Fine-tune and a turn needs more, the reply says so rather than trimming quietly.
What your documents say about you
Once cards exist, the Your Memory page adds a second paragraph to what your AIs are told about you: what you write about, from the documents tagged Mine, and what you keep, from the rest. It is written on your device whenever a card or a tag changes, and shown there on request.
Backups and a new machine
Your Vault backup carries the records: which documents, their cards, their tags, where each file was, and which AI may draw on each. It never carries the text, so a large collection can never be the reason a backup fails. After a restore, the app looks for each file where it was last seen, and under this machine's home folder when the old one differs, and reads the ones it finds straight back into their records with nothing asked. Only files that moved are asked for: the Knowledge tab and the memory page say which, and dropping them on the panel again, from wherever they live, or choosing them, reads each one back into the same record, keeping its card, its tag and every AI's access. See Backups and recovery.